This past week Pete Pasque came to speak to use about a couple new tools to use in student assessment, e-portfolio's and badges. These two processes really opened my perspective on how we should.could be thinking about student progress and achievement.
In our current school system a student could go through all four years of say English classes only being able to write at exactly the same level. Improvement from year to year is never really checked because teachers don't have access to past assignments and students rarely look back at their old work. With the E-portfolio system there would be a central digital location for all of these kinds of assignments to be held for the entire high school career. This E-Portfolio system that they have in place at Skyline High School is great, students have access to previous years work and progress can clearly be shown throughout. Not to mention that it is really cool that they are able to turn in so many assignments electronically, yay saving trees! This is one great way to emphasis to students that it is important to be able to have proof that they are able to do something beyond just the grade, for future college applications they can not only show that they got an A in their English 10 class, but that they also were able to write and awesome compare and contrast essay.
The next topic that Pete talked about, badging, was a little bit less intuitive to me. I, like most people I would imagine, am most comfortable doing things the way that I have seen them done before. Don't get me wrong, I am not stuck in my ways, but sometimes I need a little convincing. Badging is one of those topics for me, I like the idea of being able to see student achievements and skills simply by checking out the badges that they have received. In some ways it seems like a more accurate account of what a student knows than a grade in a class because quite frankly you have no idea what a teacher covered in a Biology class, it could be totally different from school to school. Badging provides the answer to the topics that were mastered. However in my mind grades mean something, this student really grasped the concept therefore they earned an A and this student has an OK understanding therefore they earned a C. That is how my brain is structured, therefore giving both of those students the same badge is a little hard for me to get my head around. It would mean a whole different understanding of education
While I don't think either of these electronic tools will be put to use in my classroom anytime soon, I think they are well worth another look, and hearing Pete talk made me really think about what it means to organize your digital life. I would love to learn more about all of those topics so that I can do a better job preparing my student's for the future, because I know that I am currently not informed enough to give them the support that they need.
Like you perhaps, Lauren, I'm intrigued by the idea of badging (and even by its potential) but I've not quite gotten my brain around it fully. For me, the one big idea that comes out of badging, related to the student portfolio idea, is one that could powerfully cross the lines of individual classes and subject areas, and speak to the bigger picture of assessment, or even self-assessment. The power for me in the work done at Skyline is students being encouraged to take the broader, holistic view of their work. In that sense, badging could provide a structure within which students are challenged to draw upon work done in school, and ever outside of it, to illustrate/demonstrate their mastery of soft skills. Giving students the tools to think about, gauge and articulate their abilities could be a great thing for schools to provide for students, though piecing all of this together is no simple task.
ReplyDeleteI was also intrigued by what we learned about the initiative for student e-portfolios. What I like the most about them is how they make it so easy for students to keep track of their education and assignments on a large scale. When I was in high school, I typed my papers on a family computer and turned in my only hard copy in class. That practice wasn't very conducive to keeping tabs on my own progress and achievements in my English classes. I like what you said about students being able to look back and see what they have achieved, and the fact that all of their work is in one place makes it that much easier to use their work for college or job applications. I wonder if students will eventually be able to hold all of their work for all of their classes in their e-portfolios. This could be incredibly powerful in the way of organization and self-assessment (not to mention tree saving). This seems a bit far fetched to me at this point, though, and part of the reason for that is my struggle to see how e-portfolios can work in math and science classrooms where the work is often done with a pencil. I will definitely be checking in on the progress of this initiative throughout the year!
ReplyDeleteI like that you bring up the point that it is hard to imagine what this would look like in a science or math classroom, because I am in the same boat (hence the English example in my post). I am having trouble imagining the types of word that would be included in these portfolio's, especially for math. Perhaps students could have science lab reports in the portfolio for science class, but what would that look like in math? Would they just post examples of work?
DeleteI would love to see how this develops in other disciplines.
Erin, I'm wondering about the use of e-portfolios in the science/math classroom too. I wonder if it would be feasible to scan students' work in? I think it would be amazing to have all of a student's work stored digitally for all the reasons you mention. I'm just realizing how crazy it is that you might look at a student's work for a couple minutes, put it in the graded pile, hand it back to them, and never see it again. Of course you have a record of the grade, but you have no idea which problems they missed, what types of errors they're making, etc.
DeleteThe more I learn about teaching, the more I feel like the key is organization! It's hard to think productively about your students and teaching if you don't have the relevant information carefully organized. With such a powerful tool as the internet at our fingertips, I can't help but hope that it can be leveraged in my classroom to help me with that organization.
Regarding the scanning idea, I wonder if Evernote would be a good route for such a system? You could have a notebook for every student and either scan or take a photo of their work. It would take some time, but the rewards might be enormous.
Much food for thought...
Lauren, there were a few things about this presentation that interested me. The first, and probably most immediately useful, is the idea of student e-portfolios. As an English teacher I want to be able to have access to my students work (for parent conferences, to see their growth, and to stay organized) yet I'm quickly noticing in my placement that it is SO hard to keep track of everyones work. Especially after you pass it back with a grade. I want students to be able to see comments and their grade so that they can continue to improve, but at the same time I want to have access to their work so I can see how they're improving. E-portfolios appear to be a way to achieve this goal and I really want to look into it more (when I have more time!).
ReplyDeleteHi Lauren! :)
ReplyDeleteYou are certainly not alone in your qualms about badging. I agree that there are different levels of quality of work, and converting all achievement into a "yes/no" paradigm seems reductive and possibly counterproductive to me. If you set the standard too low for earning a badge, students will turn off that topic once earning the badge and not proceed any further. If you set it too high, you'll have some students who are never able to meet it. Do they then fail?
Your thoughts made me think about an edublogger post that I recently responded to about "standards-based grading." That ugly term doesn't really capture what he's talking about, and I highly recommend giving it a read: http://see.ludwig.lajuntaschools.org/?p=955 (or my latest blogpost on the topic!). Basically, he establishes a set of content and skill goals for students to reach in his class, then he uses a system called BlueHarvest to provide students with narrative feedback about their progress on those skills. Students then have the opportunity to improve their work in response to his feedback. Every week, he checks in with students to see how they think they're doing. He uses all of this information to eventually generate a letter grade that he thinks reflects a student's achievements. This holistic approach resembles badging in that it emphasizes skill acquisition as opposed to numerical evaluations. It seems a bit more nuanced application of the idea though, so I thought you might like to take a look at it.